Bitcoin holders, as well as the wider crypto community, love to build narratives around pending mass adoption—”the early majority is coming, just you wait!”.

PiPrimePi on Twitter didn’t cite the source, but the image above is actually a recreation of a figure from the book Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers.

The figure really stands out to me, not only because it is graphically clean, but also because it includes a remapping of the categories, as if to suggest that some random anonymous Twitter account knows better than the man who introduced the term "early adopter" and has been studying network adoption for sixty years. I'm against credentialism, but not citing and then misusing someone else's work is pretty low.

Comparing the original categories to the description used by Bitcoin Bros, we can create the following table.

A frequent claim in the community is that Bitcoin is on the cusp of transitioning from an early adoption phase into an early majority phase, where newcomers are predominantly pragmatists instead of (self-described) visionaries. However, what the literature suggests is that in the early adoption phase, the key newcomers are those who are seen as respected figures--not by the internal community but by the rest of the world. These key community members act as beacons to those outside the community, showing that this is a group of people that you want to be a part of; they drive the next phase forward, which leads to the peak adoption rate and, from an investment standpoint, the best risk-adjusted returns.

Rogers describes early adopters as follows:

The early adopter is respected by his or her peers, and is the embodiment of successful, discrete use of new ideas. The early adopter knows that to continue to earn this esteem of colleagues and to maintain a central position in the communication networks of the system, he or she must make judicious innovation-decisions. The early adopter decreases uncertainty about a new idea by adopting it, and then conveying a subjective evaluation of the innovation to near peers through interpersonal networks.

Excerpt from Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers

Instead, Bitcoin has Michael Saylor as a figurehead.

Instead, Bitcoin has a collective figurehead in Toxic Bitcoin Maximalists.

These people have destroyed the future of the cryptoasset, and as long as they remain its face, mass adoption will be impossible.

What does the data say?

Instead of assuming a profile, we can use on-chain data to model address growth and get a rough look at actual adoption. The profile below comes with obvious caveats:

• Usage habits have changed and a lower percent of new adopters now self-custody.

• People can have multiple wallets and as time goes on that becomes more likely (I control seven non-zero Bitcoin addresses).

• Although looking at rolling four-year changes helps to adjust for historic cycles it is not foolproof.

In my opinion, the profile in the figure does not look as if Bitcoin is on the cusp of transitioning from and early adopters phase to a early majority phase as many in the community claim--recall that the original normal profile measures rate of change, so the corollary here is the blue line. Instead, I believe that in late-2020 the adoption profile collapsed and that price was inflated by a few large holders and a favorable interest rate environment. For the first time, Bitcoin adoption may truly be on the cusp of saturation.

It comes as no surprise to me that the timeline of this deceleration of adoption matches closely with the rise of Toxic Bitcoin Maximalism and the community worship of Michael Saylor.

So, congrats Bitcoin Maximalists, you’ve kept your circle pure. Have fun staying poor.